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"Next Year's News This Week" the big pivot: Sudden Reversals in Global Tech By Mark Anderson ___________ Why Read: This issue began as an examination of SK Hynix's US stock listing and the expanding geo-economic role of Asian memory chipmakers in the rising costs of everything - and the resulting effects on political power shifts around the world. But suddenly a new story emerged about Dario Amodei's increasingly hostile reception as he runs toward Anthropic's hoped-for IPO. And then the two stories collided, and it wasn't about either. - mra ___________ PIVOT: Hormuz & Pacific: Iran & North Korea Last week, true to unpredictable form, President Trump gave orders to send the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier home, moved his last carrier out of the South Pacific to replace it in the Hormuz blockade, and greatly reduced (after trying to cancel) the massive US-South Korea naval exercises around SK the day before they began. His given reasons: South Korea's new president had refused to "help him" in his war with Iran - and the exercises cost a lot. Perhaps he was unaware of the CRINK alliance (first named here) between China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea? Or that China is South Korea's top trading partner? His other reason: NK's Kim Jong Un is his friend, and North Korea has done nothing to oppose the US lately. Really? Well, if you are actually on Russia's side, I guess that's true - OK, we won't go there.
PIVOT: Dario and Anthropic Lose the Safety Harbor Last week, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei posted a fairly personal response to the world about his perceived role in using fear of LLMs to market his products. He basically denied it, framing himself as a benevolent guy just trying hard to cure cancer and all other diseases, etc. To put it kindly, this did not go over well with most of the X crowd. I read all of the comments posted to that point, and they were, in general, off-the-charts angry, rude, insulting, disrespectful, and raw. The blowback was intense. One well-known pundit posted two years' worth of Amodei's quotes that were clearly intended to terrify the public and thereby increase sales. Any hint of his original gloss as wanting to build safety into LLMs, as compared with the strategy of nemesis Sam Altman over at OpenAI, had disappeared. One commenter asked: If you care about safety, why continue to build something you know to be the worst possible threat? Another suggested that Dario not answer with: "If we don't do it, China will." It seems like that pitch has hit its sell-by date. As SNS members know, if anything, China is now clearly in the usual ripoff role, waiting for Dario and friends to come up with new versions they can ever more quickly copy and then open source (or open weight).
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